The Star by Kiki Van Newtown
This piece of writing was read aloud at the Verb Festival 2020 event Ngā Hau e Whā in which Kiki Van Newtown, Jessie Moss, Ariana Tikao and Ruby Solly performed music and writing in an event about moving between art forms.
When I first gave birth it was an intervention. After weeks spent in the in-between with no clear answer as to whether I would go home with my arms full or empty, with time pacing out to the horizon, suddenly we were all in the theatre wrists deep in guts. This is where I first learned that things happen very slowly until they happen very fast.
Today my counselor said I am like a canary in the mine as I explained my preparations for this eventuality over the last few months. I don’t know what made it immediately different, or if I just felt it differently, but I reckon I’m 80% rational and 20% emotion so I started preparing and getting my ducks in a row. People around me told me not to panic, but I never once panicked. This is the exact moment I’ve been training for.
Hospital atriums are these great cavities of light surrounded by ebbing pain. There are people gathering their coffees, and people who play piano. There’s usually a florist and a small store, and pots of hand sanitizer. The wings of a hospital flare out like a panopticon. My time in these atriums was largely as a witness, until it was as a participant, with my own ward number and parking validation. I wonder what these yawning spaces will look like over the next few months. I think about the nurses who brought me champagne and pavlova on Christmas Day, about all the kindness and humanity working behind these corridor walls, and I want to thank every one of them for what they’re about to do.
Hospital rooms are the ultimate liminal space. You arrive there over years or months or weeks or even days, which at a singular point become an event, which becomes an admission. In hospital rooms you are in the in-between. You’re waiting for tests or results. You are the observer and the observed. You compare notes and refine explanations with a team of people you don’t know but who are more vital to you than anyone you love. In those moments. The bed and stiff bleached sheets shelter you but only for as long as you exist in this space. After that they’re cleaned. The room belongs to someone else. A place that frames your experience never really contained you after all.
Today is day 5. I’m well suited to this kind of in-between, the liminal space that we’ve all suddenly found ourselves in. I am used to tracking viruses and isolating myself and my family. At a recent Board meeting I did the Myers-Briggs personality test and it came out as infj. I don’t know if I’ve always been this way because I was always told I was an extrovert. I don’t know about that either, I think people just said it because they didn’t know what else to make of my anger. Maybe this explains why being in my own company feels like skating on a frictionless frozen pond.
A lot can happen in liminal spaces. They’re full of transformation. It’s in these spaces that I’ve learnt the most about my strength and convictions, about what I control and what I don’t, and about the power of stillness. A lot of things need stillness in order to be fully revealed - truth, pain, grief, our connection to All Time, ourselves. Liminal spaces are a rare occasion of going back into the womb where we can know things intuitively, outside of language. A time to become fluid filled creatures once more, the pooling water beneath the Star’s graceful feet. Liminal spaces contain the potential of utopia.
I hope we can embrace this. My own experiences suggest that the only way through liminal spaces is to dive into them. To contemplate all the angles without hanging everything on a single answer. Liminal spaces are full of imagination. They are a time to be still, to breathe life into a vision, and to do the introverted work. They are the slow before things happen very fast. They are growth. They are an opportunity for revolution.
